information aesthetics

Points: Smart Robotic Street Sign Rotates towards Direction of Content

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:31:51 +0100

Points [breakfastny.com] by futuristic product development studio Breakfast is a new kind of street sign that dynamically rotates towards the direction of the real-time content it is showing.

The directional street sign consists of 3 separate arms pointing in different directions, each containing a LED display that shows specific text or graphics about a nearby destination. Depending on the actual location of the content it displays, each arm is able to rotate endlessly around 360� degrees. The content varies depending on what passers-by select via a list of buttons, ranging from public transport arrival times nearby to the content and actual location of Twitter messages.

Watch the short documentary video below.

Via FastCoCreate.

NeuroKnitting: Knitting a Personalized Scarf from Brainwave Activity

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:01:10 +0100

NeuroKnitting [knitic.com] by Varvara Guljajeva, Mar Canet, and Sebastian Mealla consists of a collection of knitted garments that represent the wearer's affective and cognitive states while listening to Bach's Goldberg Variations' aria and its first 7 variations.

First the EEG correlates of relaxation, engagement and cognitive load were recorded while people were listening to the musical piece. This information was then used by an open hardware knitting machine Knitic to create a bicolor pattern for knitting several scarves.

The knitted garments thus visualize the listener's affective and cognitive states as a unique and personalized textile pattern.

Eurovision Tracker: the Twitter Buzz and Conversations per Country

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 20:51:52 +0100

Eurovision Tracker [brandwatch.com] by social analytics company Brandwatch provides a visual overview of the Twitter buzz during the live Eurovision final that took place on 18th May.

In this streamgraph visualization, each colored stream represents a conversation about a particular country's performance, such as the artist's appearance, song, "sex factor", stagefactor or dance routine, or about specific emotions, such as love, fear or hate.

Some live annotations are marked on the graph and shown in the stream on the right hand side, whereas an interactive timeline at the bottom allows for further exploration.

The 3D Trajectories of the Tennis Ball during the Final ATP Matches

Wed, 29 May 2013 10:51:47 +0100

Corona Perspectives [coronaperspectives.com] developed by advertising agency JWT Spain and web development studio Espada y Santa Cruz provides an interactive and 3D perspective of all the tennis ball trajectories during 3 past ATP tennis matches.

The online interface provides different ways of exploring the large amount of tennis game data. An interactive timeline at the bottom of the screen allows the filtering of the trajectories according to the successive sets or different points during the match. The heatmap view denotes the zones on the playing field where the ball landed most often. The particle view highlights the trajectories where the ball had the most impact.

Beatquake: the Music Listening Activity across Facebook over 90 days

Tue, 28 May 2013 21:29:31 +0100

Mapping Music on Facebook [facebookstories.com] by Stamen Design for Facebook shows the dynamic characteristics of the typical listening activity across Facebook.

Inspired by the dynamic movement of a graphic equalizer, Beatquake maps the popularity of the top three most popular songs in the U.S., each day over the course of 90 days, by way of vertically moving particles.

Colored layers, each representing one song, rise and fall over geographic locations to correspond with the number of plays in that area. The texture of the map is driven by BPMs (beats per minute), and thus changes as one song overtakes another in popularity.

Watch the movie below. More information about the design process behind this project can be found here.

Every One, Every Day: Media Architecture Cube Reflects Energy Usage

Tue, 28 May 2013 21:09:33 +0100

Every One, Every Day [kuuki.com.au], designed by media production collective Kuuki, is a media architecture installation measuring 27 cubic meters that reflects the near real-time price and demand of energy in New South Wales, Australia.

The cube was built out of recycled polyethylene, a material derived from used milk bottles. Its 27 cubic meters represents approximately 1 day of CO2 that is typically emitted in Australia. At night, the cube emits different colors: warm orange hues represent peak demand, while blue hues convey lower demands. Sudden spikes in the price trigger white flashes.

Hospital Rates: Comparing Hospital Costs versus their Mortality Rate

Tue, 21 May 2013 21:37:57 +0100

Is your local (U.S.) hospital more expensive than others? And how does its mortality rate stack up against others?

Hospital Costs [kitware.com] developed by visualization and imaging company Kitware, contrasts statistics about hospital-specific charges of more than 3,000 U.S. hospitals with the mortality rate, for the conditions pneumonia and heart failure.

While the bar chart and scatter plot techniques are kept relatively simple, a rich set of interactive features are offered, such as the of filtering specific conditions or setting the variables of the 2 axes, to highlighting smaller subsets within the dataset.

So what is the least expensive hospital with the lowest mortality rate?

30 Years of "Oxford Summer Eight" Rowing Boat Bump Races

Tue, 21 May 2013 21:10:26 +0100

The interactive visualization Men's Eights 1980 - 2012 [feathersquare.com] by Feather and Square provides a complete overview of the "Oxford Summer Eight" bump race results.

Individual teams can be selected to explore their historical performance between 1980 and now

A bumps race is a form of rowing race which is particularly practiced at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford, at which boats try to catch up and "bump" the boat in front of them. Winning bumpers then move up in the next year statistics.

Words & Votes: The Changing Congressional Opinions on Gun Violence

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:34:30 +0100

The political visualization Words & Votes [sandyhookpromise.org], developed by digital agency R/GA for non-profit organization Sandy Hook Promise, provides a comprehensive look into the opinions of congressional representatives on the issue of gun violence.

More specifically, the visualization tracks each member of congress as being "neutral", on the side of "Gun Safety," or on the side of "Gun Rights". It then maps the evolution of these opinions over time on a vertical timeline.

These individual opinions have been based on two separate types of information: the analysis of the tweets sent by members of Congress and their voting record on Capitol Hill on laws and bills that relate to gun violence.

Individual members of congress can be explored in terms of being influential or vocal, or filtered by address, zip code or home town.

How Half a Second of High Frequency Stock Trading Looks Like

Mon, 13 May 2013 21:57:18 +0100

The movie shown below, developed by a real-time trading software developer Nanex, shows the stock trading activity in Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) as it occurred during a particular half a second on May 2, 2013.

Each colored box represents one unique exchange. The whote box at the bottom of the screens shows the National Best Bid/Offer, which often drastically changes in a fraction of a second. The moving shapes represent quote changes which are the result of a change to the top of the book at each exchange. The time at the bottom of the screen is Eastern Time HH:MM:SS:mmm, which is slowed down to be able to better observe what goes on at the millisecond level (1/1000th of a second).

In the movie, one can observe how High Frequency Traders (HFT) jam thousands of quotes at the millisecond level, and how every exchange must process every quote from the others for proper trade through price protection. This complex web of technology must run flawlessly every millisecond of the trading day, or arbitrage (HFT profit) opportunities will appear. However, it is easy for HFTs to cause delays in one or more of the connections between each exchange. Yet if any of the connections are not running perfectly, High Frequency Traders tend to profit from the price discrepancies that result.

More detailed information about this project can be found here. Via Huffington Post.

Mapping the Pavement Quality of Streets in L.A.

Thu, 09 May 2013 21:15:17 +0100

L.A. Street QualGrades [latimes.com], developed by the Los Angeles Times Data Desk, maps the pavement quality rating for each of the 68,000 street segments in L.A., the largest municipal system in the US with about 6,500 miles of paved roadway streets.

Using a state-of-the-art van equipped with cameras and lasers, the Bureau of Street Services graded each single street segment of L.A.'s vast street network from from A (dark green) to F (dark pink). The grades were based on a 100-point scale called the "pavement condition index".

The accompanying news article can be found here. Via Flowing Data.

YouTube Trends Map: Explore the Most Popular Videos by Location

Thu, 09 May 2013 20:10:51 +0100

The YouTube Trends Map [youtube.com] is a visualization of the most shared and viewed videos in various regions across the United States over the last 12 to 24 hours. It accompanies the more analytical Trends Dashboard to provide a full overview of the the rising videos and trends on YouTube in terms of actual views or shares, filtered by geographical location, gender or age of the viewers.

The demographic information of viewers is solely based on the information reported by registered, logged-in users in their YouTube account profiles. Next to the geographical map, the Trends Map also include a series of horizontal bar graphs, each representing a graphical summary of the top videos for a different demographic. Within each bar, a video is represented by a colorful segment, the colors are drawn from the video's thumbnail. The width of a video's segment reflects the number of regions on the map where the video is #1.

Bolides: Explore the Eye-Witnessed Meteorites that Collided with Earth

Fri, 03 May 2013 22:20:02 +0100

Bolides - Visualizing Meteorites [bolid.es] by data visualization designer Carlo Zapponi visualizes all historical occurrences of meteorites that collided with the Earth and were eye-witnessed when falling and hitting the ground.

The visualizes is comprised of a linear timeline of which the top denotes the number of meteorites spottings per year, and the bottom shows their mass, estimated in kilograms. The dataset includes 34,513 recordings of found and fell meteorites that have not been classified as doubtful or discredited. A meteorite is classified as 'fell' if it has been observed by people or automated devices during its fall.

Where is the King? Live Crowd Visualization of Amsterdam

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:55:30 +0100

Waar is de Koning? [waarisdekoning.nl], which can be translated as "Where is the King", was designed by Interactive Design Agency Clever Franke to map the movements and activities of the crowds as they gather in the city of Amsterdam today.

Based on actual anonymized usage data of the mobile phones antennas present in the city as well as the density of geo-located tweets, the map aims to inform the public during the ceremonies and festivities that are happening during the crowning of the Dutch King Willem-Alexander.

As is usual in the Netherlands, the map naturally features the color orange.

Here is Today: Comparing One Day to One Eon

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:36:34 +0100

Here is Today [hereistoday.com] by graphic designer Luke Twyman is a simple yet elegant timeline rendition that puts into context the different scales of time.

Ranging from one day to one eon, and framing the time periods different kinds of species emerged on Earth, the timeline ribbon acts like a dynamic stacked bar chart that enables easy comparison.